THE PROBLEM OF RENDERING ASSISTANCE 293
currency, but only a permit to send fifty marks for the purchase
of food.
Thus all help from the Reich to the Germans in the Soviet
Union was completely stopped. Nothing more can be done
now to help the starving colonists in the Ukraine and the
Volga region. The European Central Office for Inter-Church
Aid at Geneva has also, since the autumn of 1934, had to work
under similar difficulties; the recipients of its remittances have
also been persecuted. It must therefore be admitted that the
whole system of individual help by means of Torgsin remit-
tances was faced with a crisis, and that no one could guarantee
that assistance sent through this channel would not be highly
dangerous to the recipients in the Soviet Union. The predic-
tion that individual relief would be no solution of the Russian
relief problem has thus been shown to be correct—as regards
the safety of the recipients, not to mention other con-
siderations.1
Even in 1933, when men began to die like flies in various
Russian famine areas, it was clear that individual help with
Torgsin parcels was like filling the ocean with a bucket. It
was like the rescue of just a few of the many occupants of a
huge burning house. This led the author, who, as Secretary-
General of the European Congress ofNationalities, had obtained
from the peoples and nationalities represented on that organiza-
tion authentic news of the effects of the Soviet Russian famine,
to publish his memorandum calling for a general relief action,
based on definite proposals: In my view the stores of grain in
the American ports and other surplus areas, which were, to
some extent, unsaleable, should have been shipped at once
to Odessa, Nikolaiev, Kherson and Rostov, the great
Black Sea ports in the immediate neighbourhood of the
famine area.
The principles and ideas on which this plan of relief action
1 The author in a memorandum of August 1933 set out in detail the
general objections to relief through the Torgsin system.